The prostitution of science
By Thomas E. Brewton
web posted January 2, 2006
Prostitution of science is using its good name for base purposes:
falsifying data, and misinterpreting statistics to support a new
theory, with the objective of gaining personal fame and fortune.
Recent publicity about such debased conduct should have two
consequences: (1) people ought to become more skeptical about
new scientific pronouncements, and, as they do, (2) they ought
to become more aware that the supposedly sharp dichotomy
between scientific certainty and metaphysical inquiry is simply an
illusion.
With regard to the second consequence, more in the social
sciences than in the physical sciences, atheistic liberals have
characterized their socialistic nostrums as pure thought based on
materialistic reality. That strand of rationalism was called by
Marxians scientific socialism. They look condescendingly upon
religion, morality, and philosophy as relics of earlier civilizations
beyond which humans have evolved to higher standards of
certainty and understanding.
To the contrary, science, in liberal-progressive publications like
the New York Times, amounts to little more than the Fad of the
Month. If a "scientific" thesis puts business or religion in a bad
light, it's proclaimed on page one as truth incised in stone for all
eternity. Wait six months or a year, however, and new studies
will contradict yesterday's certainty. But if the new study
discredits one of the Times's editorial hobby horses, it will be
ignored or buried deep within the back pages.
Even a cursory review of "scientific breakthroughs" over recent
decades makes increasingly obvious that grounding one's beliefs
exclusively in materialistic science is like building a house on
quicksand in the path of an onrushing hurricane.
An article by Brian Martin, published in the June 1992 issue of
"Prometheus" explains the tenuous nature of scientific research
the appears in the media as rock-solid, established "scientific
fact." Mr. Martin writes: "Ask most scientists about scientific
fraud and they will readily tell you what it is. The most extreme
cases are obvious: manufacturing data and altering experimental
results. Then there is plagiarism: using someone else's text or
data without acknowledgement. More difficult are the borderline
cases: minor fudging of data, reporting only the good results and
not citing other people's work that should be given credit.
Because obvious fraud is thought to be both rare and extremely
serious, the normal idea is that it warrants serious penalties.
"That is the usual picture, anyway, for public consumption. Probe
a bit more deeply into scientific activities, and you will find that
fraud is neither clear-cut nor rare....In the heads of scientists are
various half-formed ideas, long-held desires, prejudices, and the
vague recollections of articles read, seminars attended,
conversations with colleagues and discussions with
collaborators.......
"One of the most common misrepresentations in scientific work
is the scientific paper itself. It presents a mythical reconstruction
of what actually happened. All of what are in retrospect mistaken
ideas, badly designed experiments and incorrect calculations are
omitted. The paper presents the research as if it had been
carefully thought out, planned and executed according to a neat,
rigorous process, for example involving testing of a hypothesis.
The misrepresentation of the scientific paper is the most formal
aspect of the misrepresentation of science as an orderly process
based on a clearly defined method ."
With regard to the first consequence, let's stipulate that most
scientists are not crooks. But too many of them have
uncalibrated moral compasses, and we pay for it in ignorance
and retardation of true science, increased health risks, wasted
public funds, lost jobs, bankrupted companies that can no longer
fund pensions, and new products that never get to market for
fear of litigation.
Prostitution of science runs mainly along three tracks:
1. so-called expert scientific witnesses prepared to support any
bogus claim in court for a fee;
2. researchers corrupted by lust for fame and fortune who falsify
or misinterpret research data;
3. and '"scientists" so intent upon propagating the gospel of
secular materialism that they betray the most basic processes of
science and even work to prevent consideration of new and
contradictory evidence.
A few examples:
-- Newspapers reported within the past few days that South
Korean scientist Hwang Woo Suk allegedly falsified results of
stem-cell research once hailed as a major breakthrough. Stem-
cell research, of course, is a matter of almost religious
worshipfulness to liberal-Progressives.
-- The Boston Globe, in its March 18, 2005 edition, reported:
"In the worst case of scientific fakery to come to light in two
decades, a top obesity researcher who long worked at the
University of Vermont admitted yesterday that he fabricated data
in 17 applications for federal grants to make his work seem more
promising, helping him win nearly $3 million in government
funding."
-- The BBC, on June 4, 1998, reported that: "Doctors have
warned that medical researchers who fake evidence are risking
lives. A major new report has concluded that fraud and
fabrication is widespread throughout medical research. The
practice has potentially devastating implications because doctors
base treatment on published research....The Committee on
Publication Ethics (COPE) was set up last year following
mounting concern among editors of scientific publications that
research studies contained faked results. It is thought that
increased pressure to achieve results to obtain scarce funding
resources has pushed many scientists into acting dishonestly. The
COPE report cites 25 cases of scientific fraud. In one case a[n
American] scientist who claimed to have transplanted black skin
onto a white mouse had in fact simply coloured the mouse with a
felt-tip pen. A British Medical Association spokesman said that
members of the committee had been approached by a
"phenomenal" number of people revealing cases of fraud and
misconduct, and that the problem was far more widespread than
was first thought.
-- The British Medical Journal issue of May 1999 reported:
"Half of the US biomedical researchers accused of scientific
fraud and subjected to formal investigations in recent years have
been found guilty of misconduct, a new review has found. In the
biggest review of scientific fraud ever published, the US Office of
Research Integrity, has released data on nearly a thousand
allegations investigated over the five years from 1993Êto
1997.ÊThe review covered inquiries into allegations of
misconduct into research funded by the US Public Health
Service, which has a budget of $15bn (£9bn)."
-- An article in the New York Times's December 13, 2005,
issue by Gina Kolata is headlined: Environment and Cancer: The
Links Are Elusive
Within the article, the reporter notes: "But pinning cancer on
trace levels of poisons in the environment or even in the
workplace is turning out to be a vexing task. There has been
recent progress in addressing the issue, but the answers that
many people believe must be out there remain elusive....
Researchers, for their part, say they have not given up the quest.
In their search for answers, they are trying a variety of methods.
They are looking for reliable ways to detect environmental
exposures and determine whether they are linked to cancer risk.
They are studying the bewildering array of factors that can
determine a chemical's effects on individual people. And they are
looking at cancer statistics and asking whether there are blips in
cancer rates that may point to an environmental cause."
In other words, scientists who believed passionately in
environmentalism and consequently blamed private businesses
for most of our problems, set out with a preconception and have
spent decades and billions of dollars looking for proof, rather
like Monty Python's make-believe, comical quest for the Holy
Grail. So much for the popular image that scientists
dispassionately scrutinize raw data and inductively reach logical
conclusions.
-- Reporting on the massive asbestosis claims under the tort
bar's class-action suits, the Wall Street Journal, in its November
5, 2005, issue notes: "...asbestosis litigation, which had
previously focused on malignancies and other debilitating injuries,
shifted radically from the traditional model of an injured person
seeking a lawyer to an entrepreneurial model. Lawyers spent
millions to sponsor mass screenings of upwards of 750,000
industrial and construction workers. Of the 850,000 asbestos
claimants that have so far brought suit against over 8,400
different defendants, about 600,000 have been recruited by
these mass screenings....This all became clear when 10,000 of
the 35,000 pending silica claims were centralized into a federal
multi-district litigation (MDL), presided over by U.S. District
Court Judge Janis Jack, a Clinton appointee. During the course
of the MDL, one of the doctors recanted all 3,617 of his
diagnoses of silicosis, provoking Judge Jack to observe that "it's
clear this . . . [diagnosing] business is fraudulent."....Judge Jack
concluded that "the lawyers, doctors and screening companies"
were "all willing participants" in a "scheme [that] manufactured
[diagnoses] for money" -- the equivalent of a finding of pervasive
fraud.....Asbestos litigation, meanwhile, prevented the creation of
500,000 jobs because of the diversion of capital in over 70
asbestos-related bankruptcies."
The next time you hear climatologists stating that "all the world's
scientists" support the green-house gases hypothesis, or
biologists declaring that Darwinian evolution has been
scientifically proved, know that they are stating falsehoods, or, at
best, no more than their speculative hypotheses.
When only the crooks write the statue books, crime will cease to
exist. When only global-warming theorists and Darwinians are
permitted to define "science," no contradictory facts will be
admitted as science. Don't be surprised that they will fight to
prevent students from hearing the vast array of inconsistencies
and gaps that make their hypotheses improbable if not
impossible.
The next time you see a court case report mentioning testimony
from "scientific experts," scrutinize it with a large measure of
skepticism. In too many cases, "scientists" are merely plying their
trade for their whoremasters, the tort bar.
The writer's weblog is The View from 1776. Email comments to
viewfrom1776@thomasbrewton.com.
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